Almost 1200 Bid Retractions In A 6 Month Period?

What type of bidding strategy is this? Just to see what the current top bid is? Makes no sense since prices for *most* items change many times.

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI....one_ViewLink

The bidder changes his mind a lot? Or then there's a whole bunch of less complimentary choices.

Shill bidder?

Who's this clown? I'd love to block them.

Very interesting, changes his mind a lot??????

maybe its bad info I cant see it, if you really canceled all your bids you wouldnt have any feedback from winning stuff. Its an awfull lot of differant sellers to be a shill.

Jim I am under the impression that some sellers "share" shill bid accounts that they have either initiated or purchased on ebay. Jenny's assertion is a good one- that this buyer likes to see what the top bid is. But then if you know, why are you bidding 18 or 22 times? Note also there is a close correlation between the number of retracted bids and the number of actual bids placed- 1173 and 1132 respectively. So the account places a high bid to see how high the second bidder has bid, then places a bid just below that creating a virtual 1-1 correlation of bids to retractions.

Much more the pattern of a shill account in my opinion.

As a seller how do you know if there has been a bid retraction? I sell a lot on ebay and I have never been aware of a bid retraction.

Bid retractions appear on the bids page. If you click on the "x***x" alias for each bidder you can see their recent bid retraction history

it will also send you an email if someone retracts a bid on your item

Looks like he just changes his mind a lot just like stamps660 said.

The numbers suggest shill to me. In 30 days he is doing 1000+ bids with only five sellers. I wonder what his 360 days looks like? Is there a way to still report or deactivate a suspect shill bidder or has ebay conveniently abandoned those processes as well?

Not every one has all the roos in the back paddock as the saying goes.

ebay doesn't care

Smells like either a shill or someone trying to discover a top bid so they can either decide if they want to top it slightly or bail out. Either way they should be tossed.

If you look up on ebay community the thread called shill bidding activity you will find my posts starting on about the second page showing basic proof of shill bidding. I took various snapshots of bid histories where one particular shill bidder had over 6,000 retractions in the 6 month category and 98% on that seller.

On several lots I won this user would bid up to my max, beat the max using $1.00 increments and then retract leaving me the winner at the max bid. It is blatant shill bidding and obvious. Reporting it to ebay does nothing. It is condoned and it runs rampant with certain big stamp sellers there.

It is why anonymity should not be allowed. Rather than protecting buyers it only protects shill bidders and sellers that use shills.

The way ebay is run now (using anonymity), to be fair to all...they should automatically shut down accounts if the bidder has over 30 retractions in the 6 month period.
It is either because the bidder is a shill bidder or abuses the system to maliciously raise the final value or is too ignorant to control how they bid. In all three cases they should not be allowed to bid.